“Even before this most recent war between Israel and Hamas, the very tiny, very rich Gulf state had carved out a bit of a reputation as a diplomatic broker, especially in hostage negotiations. This has been a deliberate gambit on Qatar’s part, which has cultivated and managed pragmatic ties with the region’s main players — becoming a kind of middle man between parties that otherwise do not get along. It’s a key US ally, hosting an American military base critical to US operations in places like Syria and Iraq. Qatar also has ties to Islamist groups, including Hamas, whose political arm has an office in Doha.
This has given Qatar leverage — and, most importantly, access. The United States and Israel do not negotiate directly with Hamas. That has made the Qataris an indispensable go-between. “You have to talk to Hamas to get anything done,” said F. Gregory Gause, professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. “The Qataris are there to help you out — and they’re there to remind you that they’re helping you out.”
Qatar’s role in this conflict extends beyond this week’s deal. In late October, Qatar helped negotiate the release of a couple hostages held by Hamas, and it may be helping to tamp down a wider regional conflict, given its good relations with Iran and open channels with the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Qatar played a role in mediating the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, and has supported Gaza, including financing salaries for Hamas civil servants through the sale of fuel to the group — with the okay of Israel, in part because Israel saw it as a stabilizing measure.
Qatar’s diplomacy isn’t limited to the realm of Israel-Hamas, either. Qatar served as an intermediary between the US and the Taliban before the two ultimately negotiated a peace deal directly, in Doha. Qatar’s open lines with the Taliban helped facilitate evacuations from Afghanistan after Kabul’s fall in 2021, and even after. And Qatar has increasingly become known for its skill in hostage negotiations, even outside the region. It recently helped broker a deal to get Russia to return four Ukrainian kids to their families.
“It wants to be influential, diplomatically, and it does understand that, obviously, it’s not a regional superpower that can dictate things,” said Bessma Momani, a political science professor at the University of Waterloo. Yet maintaining these delicate ties — and working those connections — is a very good way for Qatar to advance its interests, and its security. That approach comes with some risks, but, at least right now, they don’t outweigh the upsides for Qatar.
Qatar finds “a way to be helpful and resourceful in specific, niche areas that can have outsized influence,” Momani said. “That’s their strategy.””
“Chinese middlemen launder the proceeds of North Korean hackers’ cyber heists while Chinese ships deliver sanctioned North Korean goods to Chinese ports.
Chinese companies help North Koreans workers — from cheap laborers to well-paid IT specialists — find work abroad. A Beijing art gallery even boasts of North Korean artists working 12-hour days in its heavily surveilled compound, churning out paintings of idyllic visions of life under communism that each sell for thousands of dollars.
That’s all part of what international authorities say is a growing mountain of evidence that shows Beijing is helping cash-strapped North Korea evade a broad range of international sanctions designed to hamper Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, according to an Associated Press review of United Nations reports, court records and interviews with experts.
“It’s overwhelming,” Aaron Arnold, a former member of a U.N. panel on North Korea and a sanctions expert at the Royal United Services Institute, said of the links between China and sanctions evasion. “At this point, it’s very hard to say it’s not intentional.””
“The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.
That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.”
“What can a bipartisan commission on the debt accomplish? The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), which has been advocating for such a commission, argues that special congressional task forces can focus discussions, generate greater public awareness of major issues, and create the opportunity for lawmakers to put all ideas on the table.
In 1983, for example, Social Security was approaching insolvency—a problem that sounds pretty familiar today—when a commission of congressional leaders and presidential appointees worked out a series of potential fixes. Afterward, Congress enacted many of those reforms, making Social Security solvent for another five decades.
More recently there was the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, formed by President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. It produced a plan that could have reduced the debt by $4 trillion over 10 years by raising taxes, cutting spending, and selling off federal property. Even though most of those proposals were never enacted, the CRFB points hopefully to the fact that 11 of the 18 commission members supported the final recommendations, including five Republicans and five Democrats.”
“The US Defense Department believes the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is developing a new Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. That is, a heavy, multi-stage missile that leaves the Earth’s atmosphere and travels around the world at huge velocities before re-entering and descending toward its target at 20 times the speed of sound. Such missiles normally have a nuclear warhead: but this one, uniquely, would be armed with conventional explosives.
It’s an incredibly dangerous idea. A bad idea the Pentagon is intimately familiar with. After all, it tried to develop the same kind of “conventional” ICBM years ago – and ultimately gave up as it began to appreciate everything that could go wrong.
Namely, there seemed to be a good chance that, if US forces ever fired a conventional ICBM in anger, nuclear-armed countries would detect the launch, recognize the energy and trajectory of an ICBM – and be faced with an impossible dilemma.
Were the Americans launching a nuclear first strike? Would they lie, if asked? And how long could America’s nuclear rivals wait for clarification before launching their own nukes?
A non-nuclear ICBM was, and still is, a nuclear nightmare. That was the cold truth when the missile was an American idea. And it’s still the truth now that it’s a Chinese idea. “Conventionally-armed ICBMs would present significant risks to strategic stability,” the Pentagon warned in its latest annual report on Chinese military capabilities.”